Michael Shehata
about
Michael is a Bentley University Trustee Scholar, selected as one of 10 from 10,000 applicants. He ranks in the top 1% on TryHackMe and received a $6,000 Oberlin scholarship for cybersecurity research at Carnegie Mellon. He was also selected from 10,000+ candidates to serve as a Python instructor and researcher at Stanford University (top collaborator among 80 researchers).
He reviews for top-tier AI venues such as COLM 2026 and the ACL REALM 2025 workshop. He placed 44th of 50,000 in the Climate Science Olympiad, and engineered an underwater ML system that won 1st place globally at MATE ROV 2023.
now
- Kargo — Software Engineering Intern (AI Systems & Architecture).
- Bentley University — NSF-funded robotics haptics research with Prof. Mounia Ziat.
selected research & projects
- FRIDAY Orchestrator — Engineered a high-performance audio engine in Rust utilizing a ring-buffer architecture for sub-50ms execution; implemented a concurrent orchestration pipeline with CUDA kernels to reduce signal processing overhead by 70%.
- Miro × Kiro NYC Hackathon — 1st Place; built a geospatial routing application with TypeScript, Postgres, and PostGIS, achieving 4x the runner-up's vote count.
- Few-shot LLMs with dynamic prompts — BERT cosine-similarity based selection of in-context examples; 100+ experiments, +8% over Chain-of-Thought. COLING 2025.
- Conversational acuity in language models — First-author work using pragmatic measures to re-rank candidate responses, yielding a 34.9% improvement in conversational quality. ICTC 2024.
- Autonomous robotic manipulation — Imitation-learning policies trained on a 50k-frame RLBench dataset for robotic arm control. ICMRV 2024.
- MATE ROV control & vision — Engineered a real-time underwater robot interface achieving sub-50ms latency via WebSockets; 1st in computer vision & programming at MATE ROV 2023.
publications
- Enhancing LLM Conversational Acuity Using Pragmatic Measures. ICTC 2024, IEEE.
- Reinforcement Learning for Programming Feedback. SIGCSE 2026, ACM.
- Optimizing Driver Monitoring System Performance on TI-TDA4VM. IMUCC 2025, IEEE.
- Advanced Machine Learning in Robotics. ICMRV 2024.
reviewing
Peer reviewer for COLM (Conference on Language Modeling) 2026 and the ACL REALM Workshop 2025.
work experience
Architected a compilation engine for deterministic DSL execution trees and engineered a distributed crawler processing 3.3M+ link edges.
Selected (Top 0.2%) to design an applied ML curriculum; formulated 27 algorithmic sets and engineered deterministic unit-testing suites reducing grading latency by 90%.
Cybersecurity research with Prof. Hanan Hibshi on CNN-based SQL-injection detection.
skills
Python, C, C++, Rust, CUDA, Go, OCaml, Java, SQL, Linux, Docker, AWS, CI/CD, PyTorch, TensorFlow, FAISS, RAG Pipelines, PCB design.
selected awards
- Climate Science Olympiad — 44th of 50,000; invited to COP28.
- MATE ROV 2023 — 1st in computer vision & programming; best float design, report, and presentation.
- ICPC ECPC Teens — Top 80 of 2,650 teams; Meta Hacker Cup — Top 20% of 27,000.
- Kraza Full-Stack Web Dev — 1st of 8,000 (2020), 2nd (2021).
- Top 1% of 1.9M users on Keybr (120 wpm) and top 18% of 3M on TryHackMe.